Of all the brittle little pieces that make up the gorgeous mosaic of my identity — straight, male, nerd, itinerant drinker, mildly observant Jew — one shines brighter than the others. Ask me who I am, or what I see when I plumb the depths of my soul, and I will say, with pride and glee, just this: Je suis a Basic Bitch.
Have you heard of us? If not, permit me this brief introduction, focused, in essential Basic Bitch fashion, on the things we consume and the ways in which they shape us. We ride the Peloton; it gives us a sense of spiritual uplift, the sort we can only get when we sweat and watch a screen tell us how many calories we’ve burned. We love the Pink Drink over at Starbucks, because it evokes the sunsets our friends aspirationally post on Instagram. We get our boots from UGG and our hoodies from Aviator Nation and our yoga pants from Vuori, and paying hundreds of dollars for each item when perfectly acceptable alternatives exist at a fraction of the price is precisely the point. We have at least one mindfulness app on our iPhone 13. We wish each other things like “have a blessed day.” We count our blessings at the Whole Foods checkout line.
If the above strikes you as vapid, vacuous, and vile, you’re in good company. To our left, detractors are giddily painting us as the mind-numbed children of a culture consumed by consumption, unable to feel anything unless it’s been properly branded and packaged and marketed and sold. Smart people, our self-elected intellectual and moral betters repeatedly tell us, care about books and art and politics; only Stepford wives could be bothered with accessories. Things aren’t much brighter on our right, where the affluent and the haughty take great pleasure in mocking our bourgeois tastes. Why, they sneer, pay $300 for a jacket when, for just a few thousand more, you can have your tailor make you one to your exact specifications?
We’ve heard all these quibbles before. We hear them every day. And yet we care little. Because we know that it’s us humble Bs who buzz with the true spirit of America.
Have you been to America lately? It is, at least around its seared edges, a kingdom of exclusion. We used to be bashful about slamming the door in our fellow man’s face, which is why maitre d’s at fancy restaurants, for example, were skilled in the fine art of subtle rejection. The point wasn’t to tell you that you couldn’t have that table; it was to tell you that you couldn’t have that table without being too impolite about it. The other month, by contrast, I attempted to patronize a swanky club in downtown Manhattan — I won’t say which, but it rhymes with Plipriani’s — and was told I mustn’t enter because the 26-year-old wraith manning the door didn’t care for my shoes. The sheer relish of raw power was precisely the point, which is why this town is now thick with speakeasies and secret dining clubs and members-only pools and other institutions meant to kick the huddled masses to the curb. That this is done at all is a tragedy; that it’s done while endlessly squawking about diversity, equity, and inclusion is a farce. At South by Southwest a few years back, I overheard a smiling attendant informing those of us waiting in line that unless we had the platinum badge, which sold for something like the price of a used car, we wouldn’t be able to attend that day’s star-studded panel on social justice and income inequality.
Basic Bitchness is the antidote to this moneyed malady. We’re not repugnant commies, not murmuring Maoists who disguise our own insecurities and loathing with the tattered veils of ideology. We’re Americans, and we believe there’s a direct, unbreakable bond that tethers redemption and consumption. Very early on in the Biblical story, we know, mankind was commanded to fill the Earth and subdue it, which, translated into suburban colloquialism, means, at least in part, making some money and buying some stuff. But unlike the pernicious politruks who can only be happy if they get into Harvard and we do not — because it’s power they’re interested in, not joy or transcendence, and because power, unlike life and liberty and happiness, could only be had if you have a bit more of it than the dude next door — we’re happy with small and symbolic transactions. We don’t like our goods too cheap, because then, they’d be meaningless, which is what sets us apart from our pals who enjoy a good trip to the discount store and a six-pack of Coors Light. And we don’t like them too expensive, because we don’t believe in insurmountable barriers to entry. Like a cross between John Maynard Keynes and Goldilocks, we like our stuff at just the right price point — neither too hot nor too cold, overpriced but not outrageously so.
Which, if you think about it, is a pretty decent definition of the soul of America itself. We are, as our greatest poet Walt Whitman so elegantly put it, “stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine.” Our national excellence does not revolve around the care and feeding of the select few, as is customary in countries rooted in the rotting soil of aristocracy. Instead, we’re dedicated to that most exalted, and maligned, of virtues: mediocrity, the only virtue that makes a mass-scale civilization possible and attainable to all. Drive around Italy at night, say, and you may go a hundred miles before you find a spot to serve you a cup of espresso. Sure, that brew, when you finally press it to your lips, will taste divine. But over on the I-80, even at 2 a.m., you won’t go more than six miles before you stumble upon a Dunkin’ Donuts and a perfectly serviceable shot. If you want the sort of country where goods and people and ideas can travel all night at full speed, it’s the latter you want, not the former.
We Basic Bitches are mediocrity’s merry muses. Move over, Erato, Thalia, and Clio! We’ve Lululemon, Peloton, and Sephora, here to whisper sweet lines of inspiration: You can be a little bit thinner, a little bit prettier, a little bit happier, for a short time and for a small price. It may not sound like much, but it sure beats being told that you’re too poor for this club, too dumb for that school, and too uncouth to participate in the making and consumption of the culture at large.
And if that sounds to you like mere Trumpism with a human face, you’re missing the point again. We know that ours is a perpetually adolescent nation, the sort of hormonal and excitable pimply and pubescent pup who is always eager to undertake wild schemes like going to the moon or building highways or finding a way to meet guys and girls on the internet. And so we Basic Bitches do our thing with gusto, looking for fun when our dour demagogues tell us we should worry about the environment or Ukraine or Jan. 6 or whatever latest hysteria they propagate to weaken the resolve and drain the loins of all life force. Ours are “all the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams.” Because there’s no real point to America if whatever else we do — the faith and the fervor, the community and the family and the church — isn’t done with unbridled joy. And joy is a Basic Bitch.
So judge away, my fellow Americans, while we sip and sweat and smile, defenders of the nation’s broken heart and custodians of its exhausted libido. We’ve everything we need here at the nice strip mall to make sure this nation we love thrives by making better things to make lives better, and we’ve nothing to lose except the contempt of our miserable peers. Basic Bitches of the world, unite!
Liel Leibovitz is the editor at large for Tablet magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One.
